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Barb
Dozy little bints, Spike
thought as he followed Xander away from the car. If he hadn’t had to ferry
Dawn’s annoying friends home, they wouldn’t have passed the park. If they
hadn’t passed the park, they wouldn’t have run into this larger but equally dozy
bint, and he wouldn’t be tramping after Harris on a mission of mercy.
Whatever was menacing her chum had bloody well better be something he could sink
his teeth into, metaphorically speaking. If it turned out to be human and
he had to sit back and watch Harris play Sir Galahad he was going to lose his
lunch.
He glanced back;
Dawn's pale, resolute face watched him over the top of the front door
window. Lisa, in the back seat, was also watching, but her expression was
far from resolute, and she quickly rolled the window up when she saw him
turn. He snorted. Scared. Of him. Not of Dawn’s calibre,
that one. The Bit had never been afraid of him, not from the first brief
glimpse they’d gotten of one another the night he’d come to offer Buffy an
alliance against Angelus. Still, it had been a long time since anyone
human had been terrified of him, and it felt... good. Gratifying.
Not that he was going to do anything about it... not that he could do
anything about it... but... there were times when the smell of fear was
wonderfully nostalgic. Megan, on the other hand... just too dim to be
frightened. Spike drifted off into a pleasant daydream about draining
Megan to the point where she was too weak to give voice to that immensely
grating giggle.
Weatherly
Park bordered on state land, and in places where the fences hadn’t been kept up,
it was possible to wander into moderately wild terrain--though not, as made
plain by the litter of cigarette butts and the occasional crushed beer can, to
escape evidence of human occupation. They’d been walking for a good five
minutes and were well into the trees, a grove of huge old magnolias with limbs
bent nearly to the ground in places. Moonlight poured through the dark
leaves and ran along the branches like molten silver, dripping down to gather in
cold pools at their feet. The woman led them out of the grove and through
a ragged wall of oleander and pyracantha heavy with clusters of half-ripe
berries. The hem of Spike’s duster caught on a branch, bringing him back
to the here and now. He yanked it free with a muttered curse.
He might be a complete git
most of the time, but Harris had the right idea about avoiding the great
outdoors. Vampires were creatures of civilization by necessity, but Spike
objected to the great outdoors on principle. He’d been born in an era
where the only sensible thing to do to a wilderness was tame it. In life
he’d had harbored a romantic’s fascination with the untamed variety, but that
hadn’t survived his first few post-mortem encounters with the real thing.
“Just how far away is your
friend?” Xander asked, batting aside a branch with the butt of his axe.
The woman quivered at the sound of his voice and stopped, pointing.
“Through there,” she
whispered, pointing to a gap in the bushes.
Through the thorny sprays
of pyracantha a clearing with a picnic table was visible. Several dark
figures clustered around it, and the sound of chanting rose on the night
air. Spike wove his way through the pyracantha, cursing the thorns under
his breath, and peered around Xander’s shoulder. He heard the woman moving
behind them, and didn’t think anything of it. At least, not until he heard
the faint whistle of something heavy slicing through the air. He turned in
time to see a length of cloth-wrapped lead pipe smack into Xander’s dark head
just behind the ear in as expert a coshing as he’d ever been privileged to
witness. Xander’s knees buckled and he fell heavily to the ground,
dropping the axe. "Bloody--you daft bitch, what--”
The woman swung at
him and Spike dodged--or tried to; his duster had snagged very thoroughly on the
pyracantha when he’d turned. There were downsides to all that dramatic
flaring. The pipe grazed the top of his head, sending a shower of
vermillion sparks across his field of vision. He staggered, grabbing the
branches around him for support and coming up with a handful of thorns.
Ignoring the pain in his lacerated palms he hauled himself up, snarling.
The woman swung again, all technique gone, just pure desperate panic left.
Spike struggled to free himself of his coat. The pipe clipped him in the
head again, barely missing the thin bone over the temples. He ripped his
left arm from the entangled duster with a yell of agony and launched a furious
swing at his attacker.
He
felt his fist smash into her cheek and the satisfying crunch of bone
breaking. Even as she crumpled, electrical retribution from the chip arced
through his skull, turning everything to light, to pain, and Spike collapsed
into the thorny embrace of the pyracantha, more than usually dead to the world.
There was a unique flavor of
panic associated with being a vampire and waking up to find yourself restrained
outdoors on the wrong side of midnight. Spike lunged to his feet, was
brought up short by a double jolt of pain in his hands and shoulders, and fell
back into the lamp post he was tied to with a grunt. The back of his head
slammed into the metal post and the impact woke the sharp hot pain of the knots
left by the pipe. It wrestled for dominance with the dull, general ache of
residual chip-shock, and won out for the moment, but neither one was down for
the count.
Spike made
himself stop panting and sat there taking inventory, not daring to shake his
head lest something come loose. The yellow glow overhead was the lamp, not
the sun, and the brightness of the little clearing was due to the full moon
which was still shining over the tops of the trees to the west. It was
late November, nights were long, and it was still hours to sunrise. He wasn’t on
fire. No broken bones. He could smell blood, mostly his own, but it
wasn’t much and mostly dried. The worst of the pyracantha scratches still
stung, but most of them seemed to have healed already. Unfortunately the
same couldn’t be said for his head.
He heard a muffled groan
behind him. “Harris.”
A beat. “Yeah?”
He didn’t
sound good. God knew he didn’t have much of a brain to bash in, but there
were limits to everything, even Harris’s apparently infinite capacity for
absorbing blows to the head. “Do me a favor.”
A strangled snort, and the
sound of futile thrashing. An elbow jabbed him in the back. “Kind of
tied up at the moment, Spike.”
“Next time some daft bint
swans in out of nowhere wanting a John bloody Wayne impersonation, go with the
impulse that says ‘Sod off’.”
“Yeah, like you were Mr.
Suspicion.” Another bout of thrashing, accomplishing nothing.
“Damn,” Xander breathed, slumping back against the pole.
Spike wiggled his fingers
experimentally. His arms had been pulled behind his back around the lamp
post, and his thumbs were lashed together--wire, not rope. From what he
could feel, Xander’d been given similar treatment. He could pick at the
loops of wire with his index and middle fingers, but he couldn’t get a grip at
all, and the tightness with which the loops had been twisted meant there was a
very real possibility that too-severe struggles could result in the loss of a
digit. If he’d had any circulation his thumbs would have gone numb by
now. Spike pondered the question of whether lost body parts would
conveniently regenerate, or if he’d have to hunt a severed thumb down and stick
it back on somehow before vampiric healing kicked in. He’d had minions
injured that severely once or twice, back in the days when he’d had minions, but
unfortunately for the cause of medical inquiry, at the time he’d had no interest
in letting them laze around while they healed--not when it was so much faster to
rip their heads off and make new ones.
Wages of impatience,
William old boy.
A
strange woman in a faded sun dress trotted past, carrying a pile of white stones
in her skirt--palm-sized fragments of crushed quartz from someone’s landscaping,
it looked like. Spike growled at her and wished that tearing off a few
heads was still one of his options. The woman detoured well around their
lamp post and joined the rest of their captors. She let go her skirt-tails
and poured the rocks out on the ground, where half-a-dozen hands snatched them
up and began adding them to the... assemblage.
It was centered around the
picnic table. Not one of the new, UV resistant plastic ones in red and
blue and yellow to be found in the main picnic area towards the front gates of
the park; this was an old one, poured concrete layered with decades’
accumulation of Parks and Recreation Department paint. The last layer
applied had been forest green, but it looked black in the lamplight, with
leprous patches of fire-engine red showing through where it had peeled back from
the layer underneath. All around the table the landscaping quartz had been
laid out in lines and curlicues, intersecting at crazy angles. Random
objects were scattered throughout the white quartz maze--Pepsi cans, a mangled
Barbie doll, a bundle of used ballpoint pens tied together with dirty pink
ribbon. A scatter of devotional candles in cheap glass holders clustered
on the benches to either side of the weird suburban altar. A thin
middle-aged man in a grimy yellow nylon weatherbreaker was carefully drawing a
series of symbols on the table with chalk.
The people working on the
construction of the thing were as random as the objects that made it up.
Men and women both, ranging from college-age to their mid-fifties, with pinched
tired faces and hopeless eyes, working with an eerie, implacable
concentration. The presence of their captives seemed to make them nervous;
their eyes slid over and around the lamp post and when they had to pass by they
did so at the greatest distance possible. They worked without speaking,
each seeming to know his or her part by instinct. Only the woman who’d led
them here sat apart, huddled beside one of the benches, whimpering softly and
now and then poking tentative fingers at her bruised and swollen cheek.
“There’s something
disturbingly familiar about all this.”
Spike grunted. “Don’t
fancy hanging about to let it get more so. Your hands are above mine--I
can’t stand up till you do.”
By bracing themselves
against the pole and each other’s shoulders, they managed to push themselves
upright. “Right,” Xander gasped. “We’re vertical. Now we put
stage two of my brilliant escape plan into action.”
“And that would be?”
“Pliers. They tied us
up with wire, someone’s got to have pliers. We lure them over here, and--”
“Kick them to death?
That is brilliant, except for the part where I collapse in a
government-sponsored seizure and you saw my hand off trying to close the snips.”
“Well, if you don’t like
that one, we can go to plan B.” Xander threw back his head and bellowed
“HEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLP!” Spike looked at him sourly over his shoulder.
“You got a better idea, fang-face, I’m listening.”
The man in the yellow
windbreaker threw down his chalk and scuttled over to them, waving his hands and
making shushing gestures. He bobbed up and down, his balding head gleaming
in the lamplight, shaking a finger at them furiously and then going into
something that looked like a goldfish impression, but before Spike could decide
if kicking the legs out from under him was worth the shock, he caught the sound
of approaching footsteps. Too heavy to be Buffy or Will. Not that
Will might not enjoy watching him turned into cutlets, the mood she was in
lately.
A moment later the
man in the windbreaker heard the noise too and broke into a flurry of gestures
and twitches, contorting his body extravagantly as the runner burst into the
clearing. The newcomer staggered to a halt, looking like he’d just outrun
the devil himself, and bent over with hands on knees to try to catch his
breath. Non-descript, middle-aged, greying dark hair lank with neglect...
“Bugger me sideways with a shrimp fork,” Spike muttered. “That’s the bloke
who disappeared from the loo.”
Xander craned his neck to
get a better look. “Who?”
“The other night.
Couple of wankers chased their dinner into the pool house whilst I was in there
mindin’ my own business, and I had to teach ‘em some manners. When I was
done the dinner’d scarpered, and I’d swear on my mum’s grave he didn’t go past
me. All that arsing about with Willy knocked it out of my head.”
The others had left their
tasks and joined the man in the windbreaker in clustering around the newcomer,
touching his face, patting his shoulders as if to reassure themselves he was
real. “Tanner, Tanner.” One of them tugged on the man’s coat sleeves,
pointing to the woman who’d lured them here.
The man--Tanner?--glanced
over at the altar. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Lizzie!” He was at
the woman’s side in a handful of long strides, and knelt beside her, cradling
her face in his hands with impersonal tenderness. He looked up, back over
at the others. “Jim, Ramon--what happened to her?”
Windbreaker Man pointed
mutely at Spike. Another man, younger, larger, Hispanic, wearing a Dodgers
T-shirt, mumbled, “Lizzie Borden took an axe, but the dead travel fast.”
Spike’s lip curled.
“Not fast enough, apparently.”
Tanner rose and walked over
to look the two of them up and down, an inscrutable expression on his lined
face. “I can’t get away from you people tonight.”
“Look, mate, sorry about
your girlfriend’s good looks, but she did a number on us first. I did you
a good turn the other night; return the favor and we’ll call it even.”
Tanner folded his arms and
stood there staring at them, head to one side. The lamplight pooling in
his dark eyes illumined no triumph. He sighed. “I wish I
could. I didn’t ask for any of this, you know?” He waved a hand
around the clearing, taking in the altar, the little huddle of people behind
him, the prisoners in front of him. “But here I am anyway, and... I have
to take care of them. I’m doing it the only way I know how.” He
turned to the man in the Dodgers shirt. “Ramon, untie the little
guy. We’ll do him first.”
Ramon jogged off to the
edge of the clearing and began rummaging through a bag of supplies. He
came up with Xander’s prophesied pair of pliers and started back, making
snik-snik noises playing with them. Spike pressed warily back against the lamp
post. Tanner didn’t seem to have any weapons on him, unless he meant to go
get the lead pipe and start a game of vampire pinata, but Spike knew first-hand
about the creative things one could get up to with the contents of the common
toolbox, and pliers were among the most useful of the lot. In for
another bout of poetic justice, are we? Bloody wonderful.
“It probably won’t do much
good to explain all this to you,” Tanner said, taking off his coat and folding
it carefully in quarters. He laid it on the grass beside the picnic table
and began rolling up his sleeves. “But I do it anyway. Seems the
right thing. I can’t tell you if you’ll remember any of it later.
Some do.” He bent down and extracted a couple of pens from the
pink-ribboned bundle, pulled a rubber band out of his trousers pocket and began
lashing them together. “You’ve probably noticed that most of us have a few
problems... relating to reality.” A rueful smile crossed his face.
“I can fix that. For awhile. Just for me, in which case you’d
recover. Or for everyone. In which case...” He looked genuinely
regretful. “You won’t.”
Xander went stiff with
shock. “You’re Glory’s band of crazies!”
Ramon trotted up with the
pliers, which looked positively friendly and welcoming compared to what Tanner
was putting together. Tanner motioned him to wait, and stepped forward,
holding up his makeshift cross. “Some of us were. Now... we’re
family.” Spike pulled away, sliding down the lamp post in an effort to
avoid contact, but his bound hands prevented escape. His head jerked back
as acid fire branded his brow and cheek. “Untie him, fast,” Tanner
snapped, and Ramon clamped the nose of the pliers on the wire around Spike’s
hands and began undoing the twist. Spike bit his tongue to keep from
screaming at the incipient agony half an inch from his eyes. Ramon hauled
him to his feet and dragged him away from the lamp post, and Tanner backed along
with them, keeping the cross near enough his skin to raise a welt. “I will
take care of you when this is over,” Tanner said. “I want you to
understand that. You’re giving us a great gift, and that makes you
our--my--responsibility.”
“That makes me feel just ducky. Unfortunately, I’ve got special needs you
may not be aware of.” Spike hooked a foot around Ramon’s ankle and threw
his weight sideways, quelling a whoop of triumph when the chip didn’t give him
more than a minor buzz. Ramon dropped the pliers and staggered under the
impact, but unfortunately he had a good fifty pounds on Spike and kept his
feet. Spike kicked the pliers wildly in the general direction of the lamp
post before Windbreaker Guy and Tanner pounced him. The three of them wrestled
him onto the picnic table while Spike twisted in their grasp like a cornered
wildcat, unable to land any effective blows without shocking himself.
The three men slammed him
into the concrete of the table with desperate strength and Spike heaved upwards
against their hands, the muscles in his neck and shoulders corded with the
strain. “Hold him down!” Tanner gasped, and another three or four pairs of
hands grabbed his legs and arms. The vampire snarled up at the circle of
frightened, confused faces hovering over him, morphing into game face and
snapping at the nearest set of fingers. The elderly man and the thin,
wispy woman in the sun dress cried out and cringed away, but they were back a
moment later at Tanner’s urgings. There were things on the streets of
Sunnydale a hell of a lot scarier than a neutered vampire, and this lot had
probably seen most of them. Spike jerked violently back and forth as
Tanner began a staccato chant and his hands descended towards the crown of the
vampire’s head, fingers spread.
“Couldn’t we maybe get you
a gift certificate to Chuck E. Cheese instead?” Xander shouted over at
them. “Honestly, sucking my brain won’t do you any good. Ask
anyone. Bottom of my class and proud of it, and Spike, well, he’s--”
He’s a vampire. Lesson
number one, vampire equals impure. You can’t even...
Spike gave up his struggle
and fell back onto the concrete slab, relaxing so completely that several of the
people holding him toppled forward onto the table. Saffron melted into
blue as his eyes met Tanner’s brown ones.
For a moment Tanner looked
uncertain. Then he drove his fingers into Spike’s skull.
“Are you sure you’re doing
it right?” Lisa asked for the third time.
“Yes, I’m sure!” Dawn
turned the key in the ignition again and silently cursed the DeSoto’s freaky
push-button transmission--why couldn’t Spike have a normal car? The
asthmatic rasp of the engine cranking, sputtering, and failing to turn over
resumed. She turned the ignition off and sat back, pressing her fists to
her temples and trying to think.
Despite the trashy appearance of the
interior, Spike doted on the black monster, and kept the engine in good running
order--partly normal guy-type car obsessiveness, and partly vampire necessity;
Spike took his unlife into his hands every time he took a cross-country trip in
daylight, and absolutely couldn’t afford unexpected breakdowns. So it was
unlikely that the starter or the battery was going out. The gas gauge was
low, but not yet on empty--maybe the gauge was off, though, old cars could be
finicky that way, and in taking them back to Lisa’s place, Spike had done more
driving tonight than he’d originally intended. Or maybe she’d flooded the
engine, in which case all she could do was sit here and wait for it to unflood.
“I know, we could play a
game!” Megan said. “Do you guys know Twenty Questions?”
“It’s a breadbox,” Lisa
muttered. At Megan’s hurt look, she added, “Duh. With you it’s
=always= a breadbox.”
“Would you guys just shut up?” Dawn gripped the steering wheel and tried
to stifle the wholly inappropriate yawn that engulfed her. Since school
had started Buffy had made her abandon the largely nocturnal schedule she’d kept
over the summer, and she wasn’t used to staying up half the night anymore.
She rolled down her window again and peered worriedly out into the dark.
“Heeeeeeellllp!”
“What was that?”
“What was what?” Lisa
looked around, hugging herself. Dawn was already getting out of the car.
“That was Xander!”
“We’re supposed to go get
your sister!” Lisa hollered after her.
The DeSoto’s trunk was
large enough to hide a couple of bodies, and had served just that purpose on
numerous occasions. Dawn shoved the cooler and the grocery bags aside and
began dragging out weapons, searching for something light enough for her to
carry. Buffy and Spike made swinging five-to-ten-pound hunks of steel
around look like nothing at all, but Dawn knew from certain past experiments of
her own that it was a lot harder than it looked. She settled on a
thing with a wickedly curved blade which was either a puny sword or an overgrown
knife, and slammed the trunk shut. “There’s no time to get my sister!” she
shot back at Lisa, grabbing her sweater from the front seat. “Are you
coming or not?”
In the
darkness of the back seat Lisa looked awful, her complexion like milk about to
go bad. It was weird; Dawn was used to thinking of herself as the scaredy
one, the tagalong. Was this how it had started for Buffy, six years
ago? Just realizing that something had to be done, and you were the only
one who could do it? Lisa was looking at her with something like...
“Sure.”
“Me too!” Megan
said. “You’re not, like, leaving me here alone to get chewed on by
vampires. At least, not of the non-sexy variety.”
“That’s beyond gross and
into grotty.” Dawn shaded her eyes against the moonlight and tried to remember
exactly which pair of trees Spike and Xander had disappeared between.
Megan giggled. “Oh,
come on, don’t tell me you never thought about it.”
Dawn did a very creditable
imitation of Spike’s trademark disbelieving snort. “You live through three
months of Angelus on the rampage and see if you find anything sexy about
it.” She slung the sword-knife over one shoulder, picked the likeliest
pair of trees and set off at a brisk walk. “Let’s go.”
It was easy enough to say
that, easy enough to set off with a determined look, but once into the trees it
was impossible to tell which way her quarry had gone. “What if they come
back to the car and we’re gone?” Lisa asked, fifteen minutes later--fifteen
minutes of wandering around the picnic area, peering through hedges, and jumping
at shadows. “One of us should have stayed there.”
That it was a reasonable
objection made it all the more annoying. Dawn scowled and kept
walking. “Go on back, then. I’ll give you the keys.” Lisa
didn’t answer, but her eyes darted from shadow to shadow and she edged a little
closer to Megan. Dawn pulled her sweater tighter. It was the coldest
part of the night--it must be in the fifties, and Dawn, Southern California born
and bred, was convinced she was freezing. At least walking kept her warmer
than sitting.
“Why don’t we
just yell for them?” Megan asked as they passed another deserted picnic
table--the ominous lump beneath it had turned out to be a homeless guy who was
probably just asleep. Dawn headed back towards the trees .
“Because then whoever’s got
them will know we’re coming! Haven’t you ever rescued anyone
before?” Megan and Lisa shook their heads, duly impressed with her
expertise--no reason to clue them in that most of her experience consisted of
being the rescuee rather than the rescuer. Of course they were going to be
majorly unimpressed soon if she kept trekking aimlessly around the park.
She bit her lower lip. “Both of you be real quiet for a minute. See
if we can hear anything weird.”
“We won’t--"
"Just do it, okay?”
Dawn closed her eyes and concentrated. It was freaky how much you could
hear when you paid attention. The hiss of your own breath, the rustle of
your own clothes. The soft rush of wind through the upper branches of the
trees and the distant roar of traffic on the highway. Sirens. A
helicopter. A mockingbird running through its repetoire. Dogs
barking. And... voices, very distant, very faint. If Spike were
here, he probably could have told her what they were saying, but if Spike were
here she wouldn’t be hunting him. It was very difficult to tell what
direction they were coming from, but... “This way.”
Xander lay flat on his back,
arms pulled taut over his head, one leg stretched out as far as it would
go. His shirt had pulled out of the waistband of his levis and hiked up
around his middle. Half a dozen rocks in various sizes and degrees of
sharpness were digging into his shoulderblades, and his breath was coming in
harsh grunts of effort. The toe of his sneaker was only an inch or two
away from the edge of the concrete path where the pliers lay.
There they were, half-open,
taunting him with their nearness. Why the bleeping freck couldn’t Spike
have kicked a little bit harder? Xander dug his other heel into the
hard-packed earth and pulled himself further away from the post, gritting his
teeth against the pain in his hands. He couldn’t feel his thumbs at all
anymore, so how exactly he was going to use the pliers if he got hold of them
was a bit of a problem, but... one thing at a time. Just one... more...
inch...
“Xander!”
He froze, then slowly
turned his head. Ten feet away a ragged wall of oleander rose into the
moonlit sky. At the base of the hedge the foliage rustled, a pair of hands
parted the branches, and Dawn’s face, flanked by Lisa’s and Megan’s, appeared in
the gap, framed in dark narrow leaves. “Blossom! Bubbles!
Buttercup! I’m saved! I thought we told you to stay in the car?”
Dawn’s cheeks
flushed. “If you’re gonna be like that I will go back to the car.”
Xander dug in his heels
again and shoved himself back towards the post. A quick look over at the
picnic table altar told him that the crazies were well occupied trying to keep
Spike on the table. “Just get those pliers and get me off this crazy
thing.”
The vampire’s body went
rigid as Tanner's fingers brushed his temples and sank ever so slightly into the
skull. Instead of sinking all the way in, his probing fingers glanced
away, repelled by a surface that was slick, cold... dead. Recoiling,
Tanner pulled away, almost ready to abandon the attempt then and there.
But no--Ronnie and the Rabbit Guy and Denise and the others, they were depending
on this, even though they didn't realize it. He steeled himself, studying
his prey as he hadn't done since the first desperate days after She had
disappeared and he'd put the spell together out of baling wire and hope.
The brain, the body in
front of him weren't alive--but they weren't really dead, either. The
electrochemical reactions of a living body were replaced or augmented by demonic
life-force, stoking the cellular furnaces with a cold, eldritch fire.
Breathing was a wholly voluntary affair, the heart did not beat, and only the
friction of its own movements kept this creature a few degrees above ambient
temperature. But this body still knew pain and hunger and pleasure, this
brain still had thoughts and feelings, no matter that they were stored in
patterns of magic instead of electrical waves, and if only he could change the
angle of approach, slide in from a different direction... Tanner's fingers
sank into the skull further, slowly, reluctantly, and only with great effort.
The vampire tasted of love
and rage and poetry, blood and steel and death and moonlight, man's mind and
demon's soul inextricably entwined, a creature of air and darkness, and there
was nothing there that Tanner could grasp that would not burn his hands to the
bone in the grasping. The pale, ostensibly human face looked
up at him, and smiled. “So the hellbitch that made you was right about
something. Not to your taste, mate?”
Tanner broke away, his skin
crawling. He flexed his fingers, sickened, and not entirely by the
vampire. How different were they, really, save in what they stripped from
their victims? “This won’t work. Get the other one.”
He probably should have kept
himself from tensing as Ramon and Jim looked from Tanner towards the lamp post,
should have remained impassive as they saw that the lamp post now stood bare and
alone in the center of its own spotlight--should have refrained from doing
anything that might draw any attention to Xander, who’d come up behind Tanner
and was raising the the lead pipe over his head.
Sod that; he’d never been
any good at impassive. A feral grin burst across Spike’s face as the pipe
came down. Tanner’s eyes rolled back--not as damaging a blow as it could
have been, since Xander’s wounded hands could barely keep their grip on the
pipe, but as Spike could attest, even inexpertly wielded it was one hell of a
distraction. The hands restraining him momentarily loosened their grips in
surprise, and he surged up off the table in a black-and-ivory blur and broke for
freedom. He hit the ground rolling, bounced to his feet and spun round to
see Xander chuck the pipe at Ramon. His head was still aching, but the
rush of fight or flight shoved the pain to the back of his consciousness.
His eyes met Xander’s, and the grin widened. “Better part of valor, or do
you want to work off some more frustration?”
Xander looked at Ramon,
whom the pipe had missed by a mile. “If that means run like hell, let’s
do--hey! Running away is in the other direction!”
“And my coat’s in this
one. I’m not leaving it for the Salvation Army brigade. Run, you
nit--they can’t do a damned thing to me; it’s your brain they want to make
chowder of!”
Spike dodged
Jim and the elderly man whose name had never come up and sped off across the
clearing towards the pyracantha bushes. Sure enough, his duster was still
tangled in the branches like a shabby black leather bat, and Xander’s axe was
still lying on the ground where he’s dropped it. Spike snatched up the axe
and gave his coat a yank, wincing as he felt the thirty-year-old leather
tear. Well, he could get it repaired; it had seen worse over the
decades. Coat in one hand and axe in the other, he turned on his heel and
raced after Xander, drawing breath for a victory yell--and catching the scent of
Dawn and her friends as he did so.
“Niblet, you’re bloody well
going to be deader than I am when I catch you!” he roared. Tanner and the
woman whose jaw he’d broken were still slumped beside the picnic table, but the
rest of the crazies had taken off after Xander, and, whether they realized it
yet, Dawn as well. Which meant that he was due for a few more run-ins with
his electrical nemesis before the night was over. Spike plunged through
the barrier of oleanders and began to run in earnest, feet barely skimming the
ground. Patrolling with the others he rarely got the chance to go all out,
and it was exhilarating to exert himself to the fullest again. Over the
pounding of his own footsteps he heard the noise of people crashing through the
brush ahead, drawing closer with every stride, and caught the heady scent of
human sweat, redolent of fear and exhaustion.
A piercing shriek split the
night ahead of him. Spike’s eyes flared yellow and an anticipatory growl
ripped itself from his throat. The moon was sinking behind the trees now,
but his eyes could pierce the blackness of a coal mine as readily as the
brightest of noons, and there was nothing between him and the hulking figure
ahead but time and distance, and he was rapidly closing both. He inhaled
sharply--
Not Dawn.
He checked himself in
mid-leap, twisting aside and landing crouched catlike in front of Ramon, who had
Lisa tucked securely under one meaty arm. She saw him loom up out of the
night and whimpered, clawing uselessly at the hand over her mouth, her eyes
liquid with terror.
He
could hear the retreating footsteps of the others ahead of them; by the looks of
it, Lisa hadn’t had a chance to cry out. For a second he seriously
considered leaving her behind; he’d have gladly shocked his brain to jelly for
Dawn’s sake, but Lisa was no one in particular to him, and he’d had enough, the
last few days, of helping the helpless and having said helpless promptly turn
around and apply boot leather to his arse. Buffy might get off on the
whole sacred duty thing, but he didn’t, and if he took off now none of them
would ever know...
...until
Dawn asked what had become of Lisa, and he couldn’t lie to her or her bleeding
sister for sod all. Bloody hell.
The whole internal debate
had taken place in the space of one of his nonexistent heartbeats. Spike
dropped his coat and the axe and sprang hard and fast from his crouch, tackling
Ramon low around the knees, using Lisa’s weight along with his own--none of the
crazies seemed to have any real skill at brawling; it was only their numbers and
the fact that he couldn’t hit back which made them dangerous. He grunted
as another shock hit him--after all this time you’d think he’d get used to them,
but no such luck; maybe a human’s pain centers would have burned out by now, but
hip hooray for vampire healing abilities; his was in perfect working
order. Ramon went down this time, skidding through the dead leaves and
letting go of Lisa as he fell. Spike rolled off the larger man, swearing
steadily, and staggered to his feet. Christ, but his head hurt.
Lisa, still huddled on the
damp ground where she’d fallen, stared up at him, trembling. Fuck, he was
still all fangy; the chit was going to wet herself. Spike shifted back,
reached down and grabbed her wrist and pulled her to her feet. Lisa looked
from him down to the fallen Ramon, who was wheezing and trying to get the air
back into his lungs, and back to Spike.
And grabbed him round with
waist with an incoherent sob, and hugged him, hard, before Spike had time to
feel anything except shock.
His hands hovered over her shoulders, uncertain. He didn’t touch.
Not humans. Not anyone. Not anymore, not outside a fight. Not
that he didn’t want to. He’d always been a tactile person. But why
torture himself by sidling up to all that lovely, warm, forbidden flesh?
Dawn, yes. He’d gotten accustomed to Dawn’s presence and her complete
comfort in his, and the awkward, brotherly hugs and pats on the shoulder between
them had been a large part of keeping him sane over the long summer--and maybe
her too. But this--Lisa was anything but comfortable; the scent of her
terror combined with the pounding of her pulse made his fangs ache to extend.
“Thank you,” she whispered,
and released him.
Spike
stared down at her for a long moment, drawing the back of his hand across his
mouth, as if to wipe away some invisible stain. He stalked over and
snatched up his much-abused duster once more, picked up the axe, and thrust it
at her handle first. “Here, make yourself useful and carry this.
Let’s go.” Without sparing Lisa a further glance, he took off towards his
car, not bothering to see if she followed.
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